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Comment by ahevia | Hacker News Reader

This is a good question! And it’s clear youre not asking this in bad faith (the line of thinking that CO2 is good for humanity & the planet is a common climate misinformation tactic)

I’m not an expert on this stuff but from what I’ve read over the course of millennium. The Earth will achieve balance again (assuming no further human intervention)

For all practical reasons that won’t work for us. Using microbes as a carbon removal solution is a real potential solution! Specifically using microbes in place of fertilizers as a technique to improve soil health (which would increase soil organic carbon). Although it’s not 100% clear how well that carbon will be stored for the long term.

I’m oversimplifying the science no doubt but we can harness microbes to our benefit.

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No for sure I'm strongly of the mind that greenhouse gases do their job in creating a greenhouse, which increases temperature over time (which means more energy in the global system, which means everything from stronger storms to longer droughts...)

As a layperson I've read about the Vostok cores and understand how closely correlated CO2 concentrations and dust are as proxies for global temperature. Also I've read up on how phytoplankton essentially are the reason we have oxygen to breathe, so there are risks like ocean acidification that could kill us all regardless of temperature.

If some of those little buggers can give us an out or at least give us a longer grace period to sort our stuff out, I want in.

(edit: but I almost forgot - it would be mindblowing if it turned out the Earth was somehow tuned to bring itself back to some average. The millions of different chemical combinations and seasonal variations all mediated by the ecosystem - which seems rather fragile but what if it was brutally rigid. I guess it's had a couple of billion years to gear itself up?)

It basically already is tuned to maintain an average, just as a buffer solution can oppose changes in pH. It maintains a temperature level above what we'd otherwise expect, and our unnatural oxygen atmosphere.

If we do nothing, it is unlikely to run away, but it will take rather longer than a human timescale to put it back to a comfortable level, and there could be a lot of damage over the next century.

Anything that needs carbon in its metabolism will, naturally, use what's available.

Biological systems are tricky, though. If you dump a huge amount of fruit into a forest, the animals will eat it and grow in number; then, so will their predators. Animals who don't eat the fruit but are eaten by the predators will be in a bad spot. That leads to consequences all over the food web. Plus, dumping large amounts every year also changes the soil chemistry and changes what grows there.

Similarly, higher CO2 decreases water pH (more acidic) and can cause fast-growing algae to bloom (which decreases light penetration to the water beneath, and the algae may produce toxins).

Even when high-level equilibria are reached (which they eventually would, one way or another), they won't necessarily be the same or come pleasantly.

It’s 100% clear that carbon doesn’t persist in the soil. It’s make believe unsupported by any evidence

No that’s just not true. Carbon does persist in soil. For how long is a very different question.

Once Soil Organic Carbon is converted to Microbial Organic Matter it is much more robust.

But the threats that climate change bring also threaten the stability of land ecosystems (drought, increased forest fires, etc) which will release the carbon stored in the soil.

So we shouldn’t rely on soil alone to sequester carbon(nor should it make up the bulk of our sequestration portfolio), but to claim it doesn’t persist in soil is a false statement.

Sorry you're just wrong or focussing on a topic not the one at hand. Of course SOC is good for soil health. But for sequestration over any meaningful time frame you need to go below plow depth.

For further reading the best long term study of which I am aware on SOC via cover cropping (and that's all that we are interested in here is long-term) over 19 years found actual losses of carbon not gains at the soil depths that are important. [0]

... If we only measured soil C in the top 30 cm, we would have assumed an increase in total soil C increased with WCC alone, whereas in reality significant losses in SOC occurred when considering the 2 m soil profile. Ignoring the subsoil carbon dynamics in deeper layers of soil fails to recognize potential opportunities for soil C sequestration, and may lead to false conclusions about the impact of management practices on C sequestration....

[0]: https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14762

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